In a storage network, such as a storage area network (SAN) cluster, abstraction techniques may be used to present physical storage locations of multiple storage nodes as a common virtual storage array. Such abstraction techniques may involve defining various logical interfaces that correspond to various physical ports of the storage nodes. The logical interfaces are presented to hosts as paths via which logical storage volumes of the virtual storage array may be accessed.
Over time, the SAN cluster environment can accumulate a large number of paths for which state information is maintained by the nodes and the hosts, thereby consuming memory and other computing resources. If particular paths are no longer used or needed by the hosts, the resource consumption due to maintaining these paths is unnecessary. Under such circumstances, the performance of the SAN cluster environment could be improved by removing the unneeded paths and releasing resources that maintaining them consumes.